NATURAL LOOK

Yabba dabba doo. Fred and Wilma Flintstone have come to the big screen, just in time to greet the real-life stone furnishings and accessories that are rocking the '90s.

Stone furniture dates back to the first cavemen. It was nothing fancy, just a jagged slab of sandstone or a flat hunk of shale. The centuries rolled by, styles changed, but stone endured. And today Fred, Barney and the rest of the gang will be gratified to find that their Stone Age furniture is making a splashy comeback.

These days, artists, interior designers and retailers are romancing the stone, and the next wave of designers is primed to follow suit.

At the recent International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City, Jenna Goldberg, a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, introduced her "Bone Chair," a prehistoric-looking seat with earth-tone leather upholstery, a carved wood "bone" back, and a grassy rope skirt.

In terms of furniture, stone's appeal is largely in the fun of the material. You do a quick double-take upon entering a room and encountering the freshness, the surprise, the sheer eccentricity of a chunky cement slab table or a porous stone vase. Not to mention the wacky joy found in Edward Zucca's Caveman Television, which features a stone where the TV screen should be and antennae made of curved horns.

"It's an oddball thing, really," says Zucca, an artist who admits he doesn't much care for the violent bent of TV programming. "The screen is a rock that I got from my back yard. I wanted to use a primitive material to encourage meditation. You look at the screen and use your imagination."

Social commentary aside, creative folk wax eloquent when extolling the virtues of the common rock.

"I adore the material," says Thomas Hucker, a New York City-based artist who created a craggy, rough-edged table with a gray stone top. "Stone is honest. Stone is gutsy. It has mass. It has texture. There's a depth to it, a quality to the composite that is absolutely wonderful."

Designers like to point to stone's illustrious history as a building material - used for defense, for shelter and as an early framing device (see Roman arch). Throughout most of this century, stone furniture has mainly been associated with the garden. Think rustic stone settees, carved benches and playful ornaments, and you get the picture. In the 1980s, faux stone was the rage, as in floors, walls, ceilings and furnishings that replicated the rich look of Carerra marble and travertine flushed with blood-red veins. Now the trend is toward the real thing. No fakes or substitutes. Just the sheer raw power of rock.

"The whole idea of 'faux' is instant gratification. It was part of the '80s free-for-all, a fantasy. It really wasn't necessary that the stone be real," says Alex Locadia, a designer who has fashioned many different objects from the real McCoy.

"Now, in the '90s, people are much more interested in using honest materials - wood, metal, stone," she says.

But how do you re-romance an ancient material? How do you make it fashionable again? These are among the questions Locadia asked himself before starting work. The answers lay partly in the objects he chose to design - a watch with a stone face, a white stone phone, a stone radio with curlicue metal antenna. "We live in a contemporary environment," he says.

"When you put stone into the mix, it looks somewhat unorthodox," Locadia says. "It's a mix of high-tech and non-tech. Stone is so basic, but when you place it against technology, it takes you for a spin."

Friends of Goldberg's, meanwhile, have nicknamed her creation the "Flintstone" chair. "It's ironic because that was always my favorite cartoon. They had the neatest cars and houses that were so foreign and so amusing," she says. "The prehistoric is definitely intriguing."